More notes from Readings in Animal Cognition: Language comprehension vs. production

Knowledge Acquisition and Asymmetry between Language Comprehension and Production: Louis M. Herman and Palmer Morrel-Samuels

"Studies with young children have generally shown that language comprehension precedes and exceeds language production (Fraser et al. 1963; Ingram 1974, Benedict 1979) and that production may involve more complex processes than does comprehension (Bloom 1974; Schiefelbusch 1974). Findings with adults show that receptive vocabularies typically greatly exceed expressive vocabularies, and then when learning a second language adults generally experience greater speed and success in understanding the new language than in speaking it (e.g. Winitz 1981). " 292

They make the general point that these two aspects of language are somewhat distinct, housed in separate portions of the brain (as indicated by specific brain lesions that can knock out comprehension but not fluent grammatical sentence production, or vis versa) that are integrated conceptually.

So this whole discussion about animals being capable (most likely) of receptive skills rather than generative, as is described by Herman and Morrel-Samuels in their paper (NOT THIS ONE) (or more generally language comprehension vs. language production discussion) . . .